A significant number of black-skinned Jamaicans, especially those would-be leaders in academia who are more socially aware than economically solvent, tend to wear their blackness on their chests and criticise the established brown/white class even as they sip expensive wine and nibble on barbecued shrimps at soirées put on by the very folk whom they love the least and disparage the most.

One young streetside vendor whom I asked about Black History Month said, “Black people nuh have no time fi sorry fi demselves no more. Waste a time.”

In my considerations of the relevance of Black History Month in Jamaica, I am automatically drawn to our many failures – the dismal state of our educational system, the staggeringly high percentage of our people who are unemployed, underemployed and unemployable, the ramshackle state of our urban, inner-city townships, the widespread violent criminality and the tendency of our protectors in the security forces, 100 per cent of whom are black, to “break a few skulls” of the most powerless among us, 100 per cent of whom are black.

Concurrently, any consideration of the negatives must not only introduce the reality of the social strides that have been made, but those must be placed as important positives which came as appendages to our political development.

Ninety-five-year-old Hedley Jones, an accomplished musician, former band leader, inventor of the solid-wood-body electric guitar in 1940 and head of the Jamaica Federation of Musicians from 1985 to 1995, said in speaking of the music scene in Jamaica in the 1930s to the 1950s:

“Don Soisson, a white man, operated the Don Soisson Glass Bucket Band. It was a 10-piece band playing written standard swing-band arrangements in the vein of Tommy Dorsey. The Glass Bucket Club, situated in Half-Way-Tree, St Andrew, was originally a segregated affair catering to upscale, uptown, white Jamaican society, as well as USA tourists brought in by the banana-trading United Fruit Company’s shipping facility.

“The club was owned and operated by Joe Abner. He also owned and operated an ice-cream manufacturing facility in downtown Kingston opposite the old Myrtle Bank Hotel, which was owned by the same United Fruit Company. He manufactured and marketed Jamaica’s first chocolate-coated ice cream bar on a stick – called fudge – as well as a flavoured ice bar called icicle.

“Don Soisson, who conducted the band, also officiated as vocalist alongside Amru Sani (of East Indian extract), Jamaica’s first female international band singer. The Glass Bucket Club of that era could find no accommodation for blacks. Exceptions were: Dr Scotland, a black optician with a white Irish wife, two all-black bands – one, a trio led by me with my electric guitar – and (males only) waiters and bartenders.”

Today we take for granted that our people, 95 per cent of whom are black-skinned, can go to just about any place which is opened to the public. In the trajectory from the end of chattel slavery to where we have arrived in the present, the freedom to associate with each other, to do as we please within the law and the freedom to eke out a better economic existence for ourselves, must be seen as important points of arrival in the search for the new Jamaican.

The problem is, during the times that Brown described, we were a gentler society, even as we had less and those at the top of the social classes were content to coexist with us just as long as we “knew our places”. Now the proverbial world is our oyster, but too many of our people are ill-equipped to carve out a viable economic existence after being fed for too long a steady diet of poisoned political porridge.

To my way of seeing it, a man cannot go forward if he has no idea of his true self and what is expected of him as an important unit of society. Who are his forefathers and where are their great achievements? Where is the visible body of work that they had laid out that those in the present can visualise and feel that there is a connecting link between the struggles of the past, the tangible achievements and one’s present role? More important, does the little man – the unemployed, the underemployed – see himself as having any worth in the grander scheme of things? Do our young people look in the mirror and say, “I love me, I adore my skin colour, I am capable of much greatness. Just watch me, world!”

It is difficult to do all that if one does not know where the next meal is coming from, if one’s father is in penury, if his father before him died a broken man. Black History Month is meaningless in Jamaica. It has no utility value. Where too many of our people are only interested in the nearest thing that they can see, feel, touch and procreate with, its meaning descends into one of those esoteric labels that gets imposed on us from abroad without any real value to us at home.

When people are hungry, their heroes are dead and the past has no meaning as the connecting thread to a better future.

Lawyers, KD Knight, Samuda

The lawyers representing the various JLP-connected interests at the Manatt Commission of Enquiry seem constantly to be swimming against the strong tide.

On Monday while he was questioning a courageous Dr Ronald Robinson, PNP lawyer KD Knight introduced into evidence a press release said to have been issued by then Gen Sec of the JLP, Karl Samuda. The release contained the results of Mr Samuda’s “investigations” into the engagement of Manatt, Phelps and Phillips. The copy presented by Knight had some very obvious errors like paragraph numbers all bearing the same number.

Hugh Small, representing the prime minister, raised an issue of objection and during the process Frank Phipps, representing the JLP, presented the commission with a document which was said to represent the original.

When that was brought in as evidence, KD Knight struck. His argument was, since both documents were essentially similar in content but the commission refused to endorse the one presented by him, he wanted Karl Samuda to appear to confirm its authenticity.

The result? On Tuesday Karl Samuda appeared. At the time of writing (Wednesday morning) his statement was not yet in, but nevertheless we should score one more for KD Knight.

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